Moving Forward

Hey there, you may have noticed. I've been.... absent. I'm still here. It's time for the juice you've been wanting. The real story.

If you’re settled in for a good read, here’s the truth bomb of where all the ups and downs and twists in the road have led me since I walked away from Fresh Thymes, the restaurant, marketplace and bodega I built for a decade. A very good decade full of amazing employees, customers, community, love and support.  Also a very good decade navigating challenges of every conceivable variety that come with running a restaurant business.

While I was so very busy with that life, pursuing my dream of being in service to people who struggle with their health, creating a safe and trusting environment for people to feel held and connected with the visceral feeling of true deep nourishment, while I was very very busy pursuing my own health challenges and overcoming them, unknowingly, I was being pushed into a new level of conscious awareness about the deeper ways in which we truly heal. Food and data and diets and tinctures are only a small part of it. 

\I learned in a very painful way that I was neglecting my deeper truth as I kept searching and searching for more ways to heal, that truth lived inside me all along, unseen as I was busy reaching externally to improve my life. The fundamental truth was the way I led my life no longer served me. I wasn’t even connected to my absolute burn out. My pure cellular exhaustion.

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I suddenly closed it all. I only knew I was being guided by a very deep and primal force that scared the shit out of me, demanding, commanding me to STOP NOW. 

All of 2023 was taken up by the heavy work of dismantling three food businesses. Just that alone fueled deeper heartbreak that only piled onto the deepest grief and darkness I have ever felt. It was grueling to be honest and that is no exaggeration. Meanwhile, I had to keep it all going on another level. Stay connected. Pivot. Do something else. Getting another job in the food business and collecting a paycheck was assumed. Keep earning an income. Keep churning it out. 

But, there was absolutely no possible way for me to do that. Expected, but simply, utterly humanly impossible and trying to explain that to ordinary people who have never traversed this type of pain and destruction was useless. I didn’t even have words for the depth of despair I was in. Running someone else’s restaurant or kitchen would have ended my life, extinguished my soul.

Creating The Fresh Life was a refuge for me. To create and share the breadth of my knowledge base in the wellness world by healing myself, helped me, see ME. See the value in what I knew and intuited about healing.  While I was leaning into the depth of my sadness, grief, and darkness, I began to wake up. I began to see that this idea of not living in true alignment with my natural state of being was toxic and the things that no longer resonated, extended beyond my business sadly. 

I was going through this personal hell that didn’t let up. By the end of last summer, it began to be clear I would need to declare personal bankruptcy.  Those pesky “personal guarantees” I signed created deep financial struggles in my personal life. My husband and I would need to make difficult decisions about our home.  Around this time, I had an epiphany, or inspiration that we should rent our home and live less expensively abroad while I was still breaking it all down, breaking apart everything I thought I knew about who I was.

If anyone has ever had to declare bankruptcy, you know it’s a brutal process. It was for me. I had to overcome a great deal of personal shame. I came from a family that struggled financially, so bankruptcy was in the family lexicon shall we say. Here I was, a 50+ year old successful woman who spent a lifetime running from my ancestral poverty wound by working very hard to have the perfect credit score, now declaring bankruptcy. I couldn’t believe it and it hit me more deeply than I could even mentally grasp.  To add further to my challenges, in order to declare bankruptcy, my husband and I were prescribed what I called “the Poverty Diet”. We literally had to run ourselves into the ground, be penniless. We had to devise, shall we say “creative” ways  to continue living while also satisfying the demands of the scrutinizing bankruptcy process. 

Through all this I was still driving myself. Creating The Fresh Life, writing recipes, doing videos, creating content and committing to staying true to the value proposition I created for subscribers. Honestly, rewriting restaurant recipes for the home cook is time consuming, labor intensive and most importantly, expensive. Changing a restaurant recipe that has many components and many hands to execute for the home cook is a big challenge. But damn, keep going keep going was my mantra. Create the Thanksgiving cookbook, scale more recipes from Fresh Thymes and give all my food away because recipe testing yields a lot more food than two people can eat. 

Then the holidays and the New Year….. Keep painting the picture of moving forward with Strength. By January, my husband and I went to explore Panama as fun place to reside for a minute.  It was during that trip, that he and I committed to doing something very very brave and again more difficulty.  Him and I had been life partners for almost 30 years and loved each other deeply, been through so very much, believing to be soul partners in this life. We were in this blessed place of children having launched, getting to reinvent how we want to shape the next chapter of our lives together. We pledged to sit in deep space and craft only for ourselves, what we need to satisfy our souls longing in partnership. Craft what we wanted only for our true selves, not for each other and not for our marriage, not for the children or family. Only ourselves. 

More pain, the reckoning that our personal vision for our future and true self did not align in partnership any longer. The truth was our soul path was taking us each in different directions. After all I had been through, still shellshocked, I only knew I had to choose Me. By early spring we committed to a new partnership. We deeply, together believed that our marriage was by no means a failure. It was by all measure, an epic success.  We had done so much together and raised two amazing children. We pledged to continue to love each other into the next chapter as loving partners in life, but no longer in marriage. 

Then the selling of our beautiful home and the divorce….. By now I had broken down and broken apart my entire life. Selling furniture, donating furniture, allocating furniture, art, lamps. Putting the sum of what was mine into storage. Through all of this, my true North was to be able to go somewhere quiet, in beauty, in nature, in rhythm with the sun and moon. Somewhere I could wallow in stillness, reflection and contemplation without interruption. I wanted to feel peace and the richness of existence. Go somewhere to finally deeply REST, as was prophesied in my meeting Grandfather Huachuma, two years ago as I unzipped the suit of myself.

All I could do this year was continue unzipping and only being in the present moment and envisioning the near future. Trust this vision of what I saw for myself in healing at a whole ‘nother level, feeling the path would continue to be revealed in patches and pieces as I learned to trust in my deepest self and learn to fully surrender to where this life path is directing me.  

A few months ago, I was anguishing (still, again) because the burden of creating content for The Fresh Life was getting to be too much with all that I was juggling in my personal life. While I was absolutely loving what I was creating, I was not able to keep up with my part of our bargain. A dear friend gave me permission to just stop. To just be with this finishing process. I needed to forgive myself and allow that a reprieve was in order, hoping what was in the best interest of this little newsletter and my food would be held. I had to trust. More, again….

It was also clear to me that I wasn’t sharing this part of my life, not certain it served any purpose whatsoever to be public with this personal pain, and I had no desire to lean into victim stories, nor cultivate pity to share what’s happened in truth. Far safer to stick to topics like why GMO’s are killing you. But I wasn’t inspired to share that. I needed to write in truth, be congruent, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know the meaning or purpose of all this heartbreak. So, I took a deep breath, and stopped writing. Until this morning. Watching the butterflies flitting about and the rain clouds of last night dissipate from my casita patio here in Costa Rica, I feel called to write with authenticity….

I’ve been here in Nosara for four weeks. My nervous system is barely beginning to feeling safe enough to rest and sleep and unfold. It has been coming through me that the reason I need to share this intimate story of personal life destruction and rebuilding in answer to my soul’s calling is only in hopes that this story touches just one person who may be struggling with finding their true path, true self, honoring yourself enough and gathering the courage to pursue it, against all odds. 

To have the strength to be true to you. And, I dare say, the healing that happens when you begin to choose you for you makes all the difference that transcends any prescription, diagnosis or label you may have assigned yourself. It transcends your perfect diet and your non-toxic cleaning products. It transcends movement and mindfulness. It transcends the busy-ness that occupies your whole life in your pursuit of wellness.

What I perceive in our healing journey is a lack of energetic alignment in the body, mind and soul. Our culture provides a linear path to healing that is very external and driven by “the science” and doesn’t create dialogue around the other essential ways of healing and how they are inextricably linked. Yes, clean food and environment are crucial to transcending the vibration of illness, but we don’t talk about all three layers of mind, body and soul being congruent as essential. Truly, it's our disconnection from ourselves that causes illness. 

I will share that I am aware that there are many of you who might be put off by this turn of content that is beginning to sound more spiritual in nature. Where’s the recipe for the Tahini Brownies!!! you may be wondering. Some of you may choose to not continue supporting my views and The Fresh Life.  But I am writing about the healing process and expanding your awareness of what healing means. This is the next chapter in my healing journey, now. In real time. I’ve been writing about the knowledge I gained in my own traversing of the wellness world, but sharing about this level of healing will emerge from me as I am moving through my own healing path today. Food and recipes will always be woven in as it’s the essence of me.

For now, I’m gifting myself the time to REST and recover. To unpack it all. I put all the crap I didn’t have time to process in the last two years in a mental suitcase labeled “Unpack in Costa Rica” . To contemplate what this all means, and where it’s taking me. Giving myself permission to play and cultivate joy again. Deepening how I can continue to be of service to helping others regain their health and live freely. 

I’ve been learning that I am a courageous person. I embrace the fiery path. Offering this story to you is my most courageous act, to be seen in who I am becoming and hoping my heart sharing of this journey will inspire you to become a paying subscriber, message me for personal guidance or mentorship, share my story with another being who needs it, begin a conversation, share a desire to be in space together in person, sharing good food and getting to know what we are all being asked to heal in this unprecedented time of global change and societal health decline.

I have no content agenda on this level, my brain needs a break from thinking, thinking, strategizing.  I am simply sharing what comes through me at the time, during my process of deep REST.  I’ll be in Nosara and have other travels, all with the aspiration of continuing to surrender to the unfolding of it all..

I deeply feel I am meant to bring beauty, healing, community and delicious nourishment to the people who spend time with me. To create grounding spaces for people to thrive and heal as they connect more authentically with food, nourishment and themselves. I did that with Fresh Thymes and I hope to create something more lasting and deeply sustainable as I continue this journey back to myself. To have gone through so much pain, I can only honor it as a portal for growth.

Thank you for your patience, and reading with an open heart.

With love and the wealth of health, 

Christine